Author of "The Type B Manager: Leading Successfully in a Type A World" (Prentice Hall Press). Publishers Weekly has called the book "an excellent resource for leaders who don’t fit the mold, and for upper managers who need to fill leadership positions." My background: I retired in 2012 from the corporate world with over two decades of Fortune 500 front-line and executive management experience, most of it in Communications and Marketing. I spent the next couple of years thinking about, researching and writing "The Type B Manager." I've long been interested as a practitioner in the subject of management, both good and bad, effective and ineffective, what works and what doesn't. Graduate of Harvard College, with an MBA from Western New England University. Founder and principal of Howling Wolf Management Training, LLC. You can follow me on Forbes, Twitter and Facebook, and I have a blog, "Mind of the Manager," on Psychology Today.

The Foundational Importance Of Trust In Management

The word “foundational” was carefully chosen here. Trust is foundational in management, as it’s the solid floor on which the rest of the manager-employee relationship is built. Without a strong foundation, a relationship is unsteady at best.

Given the importance of trust in any relationship, business or personal, it’s surprising how often it’s absent in managerial relationships. The macro-level statistics invariably paint a disappointing picture. The recent Gallup workforce survey, for example, places the number of disengaged employees in the U.S. at 70%, a figure that should alarm productivity experts everywhere.

Why is trust between employee and manager in chronically short supply? There’s no single simple answer, but there are identifiable high-level factors. When I think back to my own four decades in the workforce, of which more than two decades were in management, a few broad themes recur.

Photo: Wikipedia

Disingenuous communication from management to the rank and file. Lack of credibility will erode trust faster than you can say “rightsizing.” (Employees have finely honed ‘spin detectors,’ and excessive spin seldom yields the intended results.)

Modeling behavior employees don’t fully respect. While leading by example should be (dare I say it) foundational, it’s been known to happen that management doesn’t demonstrate the actions they expect of others.

Financial pressures that force management into actions they’d much prefer not to take. Few in management enjoy reducing staff, trimming benefits, cutting bonuses and so forth, yet these are often inevitable consequence of weak business results. Hard circumstances force good people into difficult decisions. In these instances future trust may well be determined by how things are done (e.g. with transparency and candid explanation, as opposed to minimal or dubious communication).

It’s worth noting that issues like communication and behavior are within an individual’s power to control, whereas financial pressures may be uncontrollable.

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As a manager myself, I recognized it was critical for my employees to trust me if I expected them to be fully productive on my watch. For the most part I believe I was reasonably successful in this, yet I know there were times I lost employees’ trust, and even failed badly. Let’s consider a few examples.

- I lacked the courage to support someone who deserved it when faced with (arguably unfair) organizational pressures. Trust in my leadership was an immediate casualty.

- Management systems such as Forced Rankings (aka “stacking”) put me in a position to deliver performance messages I sometimes didn’t completely believe in. Yet I had to deliver them, since that was my management role, which I understood and fully accepted and was well compensated for… at times to the detriment of productive employee relationships. With trust in me eroded. (No one ever said management was an easy job!)

- Employees occasionally had unrealistic opinions of their own performance or behavior. (Relevant old saying: “There are no guilty people in prison.”) In these cases, I never regretted losing someone’s trust, as I was simply doing what I completely believed the job required.

Even with the best of intentions there are innumerable ways in the business world trust can be undermined – and, once lost, it’s hard to regain. An employee will naturally think: This person betrayed my trust before – why should I believe he or she won’t do it again?

In short, trust is a fragile commodity in management, yet an exceedingly valuable one. It can make all the difference between an employee who is emotionally committed to an organization – engaged – and highly productive, and one who is disengaged or even destructive.

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Comments

Victor- the broad themes you describe point to a lack of integrity, which is essential in building trust. A high integrity manager who walks the talk and leads with authentic trust will have no problem engaging in (and maintaining) high trust relationships with employees.

Barbara Kimmel, Executive Director, Trust Across America – Trust Around the World

This is an insightful and timely (for me) article. I’m studying to take my Professional Engineering Manager (PEM) certification exam, and a lot of the material addresses effective management and leadership skills. Trust IS the foundation upon which all other skills can be built. Without trust, the manager will be ineffective. No other skills or traits can address or replace the lack of trust.

Glad the article was of interest and value to you – thanks for taking the time to comment. Fully agree that even the most impressive technical skills are of little management value without trust underlying them.

Excellent self-awareness on your “trustability” with leading your team. Trustable leaders proactively look out for the interests of their direct reports and support them. It is balancing the command & control requirements of management with “servant leadership”. Your team succeeds…then you succeed. These are the principle that allow the leader to increase engagement and earn Relationship Capital (RC).

Thanks for these thoughts. As I’ve often said and written before, management is an extremely challenging occupation and I know I had plenty of failures over the years. Hard to imagine there are many longtime managers who haven’t. No doubt “trustability,” as you nicely put it, is a key element in the management equation. Your team needs to succeed in order for you to succeed… and in all likelihood they’ll only succeed if they believe you’re trustworthy.

Excellent article, Victor. Not only is “Trust is Foundational” to business success, our survey of 2700 senior executives indicates high levels of trust can give a company a 15% or greater competitive advantage, which manifests in greater revenues, innovation, lower costs of doing business, better supplier relationships, higher alliance and acquisition success, improved team performance, higher employee retention, all of which lead to greater profits.

We have concluded that, because of its critical role in the functioning of corporate DNA, Trust should be the “central organizing principle” of corporate culture.

The Trust Across America-Trust Around the World’s Business Alliance Task Force is addressing the “Business Case for Trust.” Our “meta-findings,” (ready for release on January 1st) will not only confirm your point, but will provide compelling rationale (with quantifiable data) why trust is one of the most important issues a leader must pay attention to and its power to produce enormous return on investment.

Robert Porter Lynch, CEO Warren Company, member of the Trust Across America-Trust Around the World Business Alliance